Google's DeepMind turns to StarCraft II after conquering Go

Google’s DeepMind has announced that it will be making use of game development studio Blizzard’s StarCraft II game as a testing platform for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning research, opening the environment worldwide. The announcement, made during Blizzard’s BlizzCon conference at Anahaim on Sunday, has seen both companies build an open research environment to be used by anyone across the globe as of 2017, as well as by DeepMind itself. “We’ve worked closely with the StarCraft II team to develop an API that supports something similar to previous bots written with a ‘scripted’ interface, allowing programmatic control of individual units and access to the full game state (with some new options as well),” DeepMind said. “Ultimately, agents will play directly from pixels, so to get us there, we’ve developed a…